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One of the tough things about open source is that the world never stands still. Actually, it’s not just open source, it’s software in general, but open source exacerbates it. See, one of the main motivations for open source developers is fun and the enjoyment of sharing something cool you did. So you’d like to be able to do something cool and then have it stay cool.

But the problem is, once you get something cool working, it’s almost guaranteed that it’s going to stop working soon. Why? Because everyone else is doing other cool things. Including all the developers whose projects yours depends on. So the odds approach 100% that before long your cool thing is going to break with the latest version of FooBarLib. And broken things are no longer cool.

And fixing your cool thing, that broke for no fault of your own and for reasons you don’t agree with, is the absolute opposite of fun.

Even large developers are vulnerable to this. Right now I’m banging my head against trying to get my Seam + GWT example working with the latest 2.0 release of Seam. But Seam made a number of changes that are frustrating me rather deeply right now. For one thing, they changed the packaging for their embeddable EJB support such that you have to install the JBoss embedded EJB container directly onto your Tomcat. No more delivering a nice simple WAR file that uses Seam and EJB3, now it’s a multi-step process that leaves your Tomcat fairly JBossified.

The nominal rationale for doing this is that it lets the EJB3 services be shared by all the apps inside that Tomcat instance. So you might think, great, now my Seam+EJB3 WAR file is 6MB instead of 20MB. (Which is indeed a problem with the demo version on my page — it’s stinkin’ HUGE.) But, BUT, it turns out you can’t actually run multiple Seam apps under the Embedded EJB3 container!

Why not? Well, because Bill Burke and Gavin King, both of whom work at JBoss and both of whom are fairly bullheaded, can’t agree on whose problem it is that multiple Seam apps collide in the Embedded EJB3 component registry. Not only that, but the Embedded EJB container’s development has stalled. So, Tomcat is a seriously second-class citizen as far as Seam is concerned now. Of course from a JBoss perspective this is arguably good, because JBoss doesn’t get support revenue from Tomcat installations. For me, though, it sucks, because I don’t want my Seam / GWT example to require JBoss.

And the icing on the cake is that the Embedded JBoss container doesn’t run under Java 6. I like to run on the latest Java. It’s just a funny preference I have, I don’t know why. But JBoss does classloader tricks that Sun apparently considers invalid loopholes, which Sun closed in Java 6. This results in charming errors like:

ERROR 01-11 21:56:07,921 (AbstractController.java:incrementState:456) -Error installing to Instantiated: name=DeploymentFilter state=Described java.lang.IllegalStateException: Class not found: [Ljava.lang.String;

And JBoss and Sun are finger-pointing about who broke who. So Seam isn’t at all guaranteed to run under Java 6 in any way, and JBoss and the Seam team consider it Sun’s problem, not theirs.

So what am I going to do? I’ve got a conference presentation coming up and I wanted to use this demo with the latest Seam and latest GWT. But it’s starting to look like I’m going to have to sink way too much time into mucking about with Seam for reasons I’d rather not have anything to do with. I’ll probably follow the path of least resistance, which is just to roll back to Java 5 and grin and bear it. It’s definitely demotivating, though. Definitely. Demotivating.